In what's guaranteed to be a slow and painful transition for the manufacturer in its bid to compete with Intel in the multi-core race, AMD has begun the transition to the 65 nm manufacturing process, with the first chips rolling off the line this week. The new desktop chips will consume 30 percent less power than chips of the same speed made using a 90 nm process. As the company continues to transition manufacturing lines to a 65 nm process, it will launch new desktop, server and notebook chips that boast performance gains and/or energy savings. AMD will complete the transition of all of its lines to 65 nm by the middle of next year.

Meanwhile, Intel, which has completed the transition to 65 nm, is now looking toward 45 nm--the company will begin shipping 45 nm chips toward the end of 2007. AMD also has 45 nm plans; the manufacturer claims that it will make the transition in just 18 months, a timetable that's unheard of in chip manufacturing, especially with a difficult transition like that to a 45 nm process. "Eighteen months to 45 (nanometers) is tough but doable," Risto Puhakka, an analyst at VLSI Research, said.

For more on the escalating multi-core war:
- see this CNET article